Rural land in the 1901 census: inequality, gender and property

Sylvester states that several dimensions of rural property deserve careful attention when one uses the Canadian Families Project (CFP)'s household sample of the 1901 census of Canada as enumerators tended to aggregate property ownership to heads of households, meaning men, rather than listing the property owned, leased, or otherwise held by every individual, therefore producing gender biased information. Because of its narrow treatment of property ownership and its disregard for how rural families internally assigned responsibility for the current or future disposition of property, the census does not represent a close reading of individual property, especially among women property holders.